Re: systemd woes continue

Hey John,

> The gist is: A lot of projects don't test their code on systems with
separate
> /usr partitions anymore, so things get silently broken.

I don't have separate /usr, just single / (ext4) partition, and just
separate /boot (ext2), and still systemd fails to mount this /boot file
system, similar to Michael issue. So, I dont think it is really related to
separate /usr vs non separate /usr.

PS. On my amd64 system with systemd, I do have separate /usr, and it does
work.

Regards,
Witold


śr., 17 lip 2019 o 13:33 Frank Scheiner <[email protected]> napisał(a):

> On 7/17/19 11:54, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> > On 7/17/19 11:00 AM, Michael Cree wrote:
> >> On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 04:11:44PM +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
> wrote:
> >>> I assume you are talking about the non-functionality of a separate
> /usr partition,
> >>> but this is something that isn't guaranteed to work well on Linux,
> >>
> >> Pardon?  A separate /usr partition has always been supported on
> >> Linux, so I am not sure what you are tallking about...
> >
> > It's not really supported anymore:
> >
> >> https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-is-broken/
> >> https://lwn.net/Articles/670071/
> >
> > We have recently had a similar discussion on the debian-68k mailing list.
> >
> > The gist is: A lot of projects don't test their code on systems with
> separate
> > /usr partitions anymore, so things get silently broken.
>
> Very unfortunate.
>
> >>> debian-installer doesn't use fdisk (anymore), it uses partman. Did you
> try any of
> >>> the recent installation images, see [1]. Please note these images are
> currently
> >>> shipped without proprietary firmware.
> >>
> >> Yeah, that's a problem for any Alpha with a Qlogic SCSI controller.
>
> If you want to use e100 (e.g. DE602) and tg3 (e.g. DEGXA) driven NICs
> during installation, these should be added here, too.
>
> I actually wanted to provide a write-up of my in-depth testing of some
> older ISOs from Adrian on DS20E, DS25 and ES45, but I didn't find the
> time yet and there are already newer ISOs available to try, so I'll just
> put some parts of what I learned here, as it seems to fit the discussion:
>
> What I saw during my testing (when a Qlogic SCSI controller (e.g. KZPBA)
> is used - mainly relevant for ES45 which has no integrated SCSI
> controller, DS20E and DS25 instead have integrated Adaptec SCSI
> controllers which aren't affected) is, that the qla1280 driver gets
> loaded during startup of the installer (kernel) automatically. It
> doesn't work though due to missing firmware. Then when you provide the
> firmware DEBs to the installer it takes multiple attempts to actually
> install the required firmware for the Qlogic SCSI controller. When it
> finally succeeds (I actually don't remember if it succeeded at all, or
> if I manually put the firmware in place), the qla1280 driver is unloaded
> and then reloaded (this time with firmware in place). But unfortunately
> the Qlogic SCSI controller is no longer responsible. I don't know if
> this is due to the first load w/o firmware or due to the unloading, but
> it doesn't matter, providing the firmware as intended by the installer
> doesn't work for such a configuration.
>
> The only way to get it working was to blacklist the qla1280 module
> during startup, manually mount a prepared firmware directory to
> `/lib/firmware` and manually load the qla1280 module afterwards but
> before entering the partitioning step.
>
> Similar for the NIC modules, when using e100 or tg3 driven NICs on Alpha.
>
> BTW here other architectures differ, e.g. an rx2660 (ia64) with two tg3
> driven NICs works perfectly fine w/o firmware available and I've also
> seen it working perfectly with e100 driven NICs on x86 IIRC.
>
> If you have a tulip driven NIC and/or a sym53c8xx driven SCSI controller
> (e.g. KZPCA) you're fine, as these don't require firmware. Same for
> machines with Adaptec controllers, though the integrated NICs of the
> DS25 still require firmware to operate correctly.
>
> ****
>
> To sum things up: what Adrian intends to do for Alpha - pre-include the
> firmware on the installer discs - seems to be the only way to get this
> problem fixed w/o manual intervention during installation.
>
> > It's on my TODO list. It's just not trivial since I need to modify
> debian-cd
> > to be able to merge the contrib and non-free repositories from the main
> > FTP servers during CD image build.
>
> JH Chatenet once created a debootstrap "addon" (see [1] for details)
> that merges "unstable" and "unreleased" suites, maybe functionality from
> that addon can be reused here?
>
> [1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-alpha/2014/06/msg00012.html
>
> Cheers,
> Frank
>
>

-- 
Witold Baryluk
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